Google has been in the news quite a bit lately. From their successful social network to FTC concerns, they manage to stay in conversation. Today, they announced that effective March 1st, a new terms of service and privacy policy will go into effect.

What makes this change different from the others is that it will consolidate all terms of service and privacy policies across all of their different products, 70 documents currently, into one single document. As with most documents of this nature, it can be very confusing for many and with many different products or services, actually reading or even understanding them, is very unlikely for most users.

The company looks to streamline the whole process and make it easier for users to understand. So what is exactly raising eyebrows?

“For example, if you’ve been doing some web searches, then head over to browse videos at YouTube, currently, Google’s various privacy policies don’t allow it to use your search history to suggest videos when you hit the YouTube home page. Instead, YouTube suggestions would only be generated after you started searching there.”

“With this new change, Google can take your search history and do this type of thing. And potentially, it can use that search history to do other things, such as allow advertisers to retarget you based on what you’ve searched on as you surf the web — something Google currently does not do.”

Essentially, this could give advertisers a better and more improved way of displaying ads. At the end of the day, the tech company makes 96% of their income from advertising so the more they can help advertisers, the better.

How do you feel about Google doing this? Good for users, or a sneaky cover for something else?

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Comments

Oh, this is all that's changed? Well that's not too bad at all. Facebook is already doing this kind of thing. As long as people's information is not leaked, what's the problem? Thanks for the great service, Google, that I have never paid a penny for. Thanks for making information so much easier to get without asking for anything back.
I really don't know why people can't just be thankful, they have to 'raise their eyebrows'.